Âme - Rrose Selavy

Âme - Rrose SelavyRrose Selavy is, without hesitation, recognizable as Ame, but you needn't know a thing about who or what Kristian Beyer and Frank Wiedemann do or have done for it to make sense. It's not that either one marches out a hook or fixes on a particular melodic element to take their place in the room in which they play. Ame is exploring a particular tonal range here—a sparkling mid-range typified by the churchy organ that puts dots all over both sides of this release, especially the B.

It's evoked by everything else, though—"Junggesellenmaschine"'s dense swirls of hi-hats and pinwheel percussion and glow-in-the-dark electric-keyboard lines (as opposed to synthesizers, though obviously those are in there too), and on "Rrose Selavy," dusty vocal drops, a hissing quasi-hi-hat and pinpoint, foghorn-ish string pads. "Rrose" takes a minute or two to fully wind down, but the middle section is full of the kind of tone bursts and clusters that could have come from The Grandfather Paradox, the essential 2009 mix of experimental electronic music that Ame, along with Henrik Schwarz and Dixon, selected and mixed. "Junggesellenmaschine" comes to a full stop, essentially ending where it began—somewhere rather gorgeous.